


a love restrained

by NellieOleson



Category: Longmire (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 07:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18162749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NellieOleson/pseuds/NellieOleson
Summary: His timing, as usual, probably wasn’t the best, but he needed to get this out before he lost the courage.





	a love restrained

**Author's Note:**

> zip wanted walt to wash some dishes, and i wanted some relationship progress at the end of season 3 where it belonged. :P
> 
> This is set during 3.9

Walt stood behind his desk holding the folder that felt heavier than it had any right to. He hadn’t been lying when he told Vic that serving papers was part of the job if the county was short on process servers. All of that was true, but none of it was the reason he was the one handing divorce papers to her. 

Vic’s cockiness and confidence drained away when she took the folder. Walt figured she knew exactly what was in it, and he wanted to find Sean and punch him in the face. Maybe bring Henry along and let him punch Sean in the face too.

He reined in the violence of his thoughts. That wasn’t what Vic needed from him right now. 

She sat down and looked over the papers. Walt watched her closely, wondering what this meant for her decision to stay in Wyoming. Without Sean and his job to anchor her here in Absaroka, what did she have? He hadn’t done much in the way of convincing her to stay. Some days he felt like every choice he made regarding Vic was the wrong one.

Maybe it was time he changed that.

His timing, as usual, probably wasn’t the best, but he needed to get this out before he lost the courage. His hands-off approach to this situation has been a disaster and it was time he told her the truth, or as much of the truth as he could manage. 

She didn’t look at him while he struggled with the words. That might have been the only reason he managed to get them out at all. 

“But the point is, Vic. I want you to stay.” He wanted that so much, more than anything right now. 

The expression on her face when she finally did look at him made him regret not telling her sooner. He didn’t like the thought of her believing that he’d ever wanted anything different. 

The stunned look gave way to something defiant and sure, something more like Vic, when she asked him for a pen. The reality of her divorce settled over him while he watched her sign her marriage away. 

Sean was a fool.

Vic stood up like she was ready to leave, but here was something else Walt needed to clear up. It hadn’t seemed right to press the issue earlier, but the day was over now and he still didn’t want her going home alone. 

“So, uh. When we were out on Pike’s Bridge—” Walt glanced at the dark windows and caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. He drew some extra courage from his reflection and turned back to Vic. “You said that Sean was around, and you wouldn’t be home alone.” 

“That might not have been entirely true.” Vic’s gaze stayed steady and direct. Maybe she’d been looking at his reflection too.

“Okay then.” He grabbed his hat and coat and opened the side door. “Let’s go.” 

“Really, Walt. You don’t have to—”

“I do, Vic.” It wasn’t about whether or not she could take care of herself. Branch was his responsibility.

He won’t have him putting his hands on her again. 

 

*********

 

Vic turned toward him while he rolled to a stop in her driveway. “My house is a mess. I know it’s a mess. So don’t pretend it’s not. Okay?”

“Okay.” 

“It’s just—” She tapped her fingers on her knee and stared out the windshield. “Things have been pretty shitty lately and mopping floors wasn’t real high on my priority list.” 

She unclipped her seatbelt and climbed out of the Bronco. Walt followed her to her front door thinking about all the things she’d been through recently. He thought about Branch and how he’d ignored all the signs that Branch was not okay. 

He didn’t want to do that with Vic.

Vic locked the front door behind them and waved Walt into the living room. “I’m going to take a shower and put on clothes that don’t suck.” She shoveled some laundry and a pile of folders from the couch to the side chair. “Here. It’s all yours.”

Walt dropped his hat onto the coffee table, stuck his thumbs in his belt and looked around. The house was small, easy to defend. He watched Vic walk up the stairs and stood there until he heard the shower running. 

Vic found him at the sink washing dishes when she came back downstairs. Her hair was down and she was wearing clothes that looked soft and a lot more comfortable than her uniform. He hasn’t seen her with her hair down since that day at the hospital when the doc had stitched him back together. 

He wished stitching Vic back together could be that simple. 

She pulled in next to him and bumped his arm with her shoulder. “You know i have a machine for that.”

“This is faster.” 

She turned around and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed. Walt had to force himself to concentrate on the plate he was holding. “You don’t know how it works, do you?”

“Nope.”

Vic looked around the room like she hadn’t really seen it in awhile. “If I’d known you were going to clean my kitchen, I’d have invited you over sooner.”

“Yep.” Walt was having a hard time getting his brain to work in the face of all this domesticity. It was so far from the things he usually did with Vic at his side and so much closer to the things he wanted to do with her. “I ordered a pizza.” It seemed like the best option after a cursory glance at her pantry and refrigerator.

She made a face at the mention of pizza. As far as Vic was concerned, she hadn’t had a good slice of pizza since leaving the East Coast. He finished up the dishes and put them away while Vic sat on the clean counter and directed him toward the appropriate cabinets.

*****

The disappointing pizza sat on the coffee table with two cans of iced tea for company. Walt picked out another slice and watched Vic tear her crust into small pieces. 

“Do you miss Philadelphia?” Vic never passed up an opportunity to disparage the local everything, and he thought it might be a good distraction from the state of her life. 

She dropped the rest of her mutilated crust onto the plate in her lap and said exactly what he was expecting her to say. “I miss good pizza.”

“We have good pizza.” He took a bite of his slice just to prove how edible it was.

“Oh, Walt. This pizza is shit and you don’t even know it.”

She smiled at him, and he wondered again what he would do if she ever left. 

Vic looked down at her hands and grew serious. “We’re not really short on process servers are we?”

“Well, we might be.”

“But that’s not the reason you gave me the divorce papers.”

“No.” He wanted to spare her the embarrassment, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her. “Sean sent them to me.” 

“I didn’t know he was going to do that.” She said that like an apology, but Walt didn’t figure she had anything to be apologizing for.

“It’s fine. Part of the job.”

Vic didn’t seem inclined cede any ground on that point. “No. Not like this it isn’t. He’s just being fucking petty. He thinks—” she stopped there but that was ok. Sean had made it perfectly clear what he thought. 

“Yep.” Walt didn’t want to talk about Sean. Vic rubbed at the collar of her shirt and winced either in pain or at the memory of Branch throwing her against the window. “How’s your neck?”

“Fine.” 

“Let me see.” She rolled her eyes at him but turned so he could get a better look. He dipped his head and lifted her chin. There was some light bruising that looked like it was going to fade instead of get worse. Vic shivered just a little when he ran his thumb across it, and Walt had a hard time taking his hand away. 

She took a deep breath and cleared her throat before standing up to make a break for her bedroom. “I should probably go and get some sleep. I’ll be back down in a couple of hours.” 

“Ok.” He couldn’t think of anything to say to make her stay longer. 

He listened to her move around upstairs and wished he had a beer or six. He stood up and sat down, then did it again. It was quiet now and that meant she was in bed. He got up and went to the kitchen. He busied himself in there for awhile, wiping down the counters, then he took the pizza box out to the trash can. 

The night was clear, and he walked around the little house a couple of times. There were fewer stars here than at his cabin. He wondered if Vic might want to see the night sky from his house some day.

He went back inside and locked the door. 

He watched the front door and thought about a motel in Arizona, about how he’d wanted her even then despite the ring on her finger. 

*******

Vic came back down after couple of hours that felt like forever.

She looked soft and rumpled when she told him it was his turn to sleep. 

He wanted to stay awake and share this quiet time of the night with her, but he wouldn’t be any good to her if he was too tired to think straight. He grabbed his hat, angled it down over his eyes and leaned deep into the corner of the couch. Vic touched his shoulder on her way by and he rubbed at the spot while he listened to her making coffee. 

She stopped next to him when she came back and stood there for a long time. He resisted the urge to lift up his hat and wondered if she knew he wasn’t sleeping. The air moved in front of him. The other side of the couch dipped when she sat down. 

Walt listened to the clink of Vic’s cup on the coffee table, the pages of her paperback flipping while she read. He missed this, he realized, these simple noises of another human being sharing space with him. 

*******

Walt woke up confused, still under his hat and unable to move—pinned down by a warm weight that smelled too good to be anything but Vic. He lifted up his hat to look at her. She was curled up against his side looking like every fantasy he didn’t know he had. 

He only had a few seconds to stare at her face before she opened her eyes and looked back at him. She sat up and leaned forward with her head down and her elbows on her knees like she was trying to get her bearings.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep all over you.”

“It’s ok.” Then he said more than he normally would have. “I don’t mind.” That got her attention and something in her expression made him feel like she was reading between all his lines. 

Vic sat up and pulled up a knee so she was facing him. The full force of her gaze was blinding and Walt could only sit there frozen in the face of her intentions. 

She took his hat off his head and for a heart-stopping moment he thought she was going to put it on her own head, and he’s been around long enough to know where that would lead. Instead, she sat it on the table next to her cold coffee and her phone. 

Her hands felt cool and dry on his face. He doubted he could say either of those things about his own hands. He thought about all the reasons this was a bad idea and forgot about every one of those reasons the moment her lips touched his. She kissed him like she was testing the waters before diving in. 

“I’ve wanted to do that for so long.” He was surprised by that, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. He thought about that night at Chance Gilbert’s house, about how she’d run straight back into that nightmare to find him. He realized now that he’d never wondered where Sean was while Vic was watching the doc stitch him up. That she was there with him had seemed so right, he’d never questioned it. 

Maybe Sean’s suspicions weren’t so far off.

“Are you ok, Walt?”

Vic was starting to look like maybe she’d done something wrong. Walt kissed her before that thought could take hold. “Yep.”

He was just moving his hands someplace more interesting when her phone rang, shrill and loud in the charged quiet between them. 

Walt let his hands slip down to the sides of her hips instead of up under her shirt where they’d been headed.

“Fuck.” She sounded like she was as annoyed by the interruption as he was. 

Ignoring the phone wasn’t really an option when you were part of a department as small as theirs. Vic rested her forehead against his for a moment before reaching out to the phone sitting next to her half-full coffee cup. 

“This is Vic.” She listened intently for a bit while Walt watched her just as intently. “Ok.” Vic pressed a button on her phone and tossed it onto the couch. “That was Ferg. There was a fire at the Red Pony.”

Henry. 

She put her hand on his cheek when he stiffened, ready to spring up and run out. “Henry’s fine,” she said like she was reading his mind. “The fire’s out. Nobody was hurt.” She stuck his hat back on his head, tipping it slightly to the side. “But we should go before something else starts to burn.” 

The implications of that left him dumbfounded enough to match the angle of his hat. Vic watched him, clearly amused with herself, and Walt said the only thing he could think of.

“Boy howdy.”


End file.
